Telemedicine, also known as telehealth, is the communication over distance through text, audio or video media for the education, evaluation and treatment of disease and illness. Telehealth is the use of information technology and telecommunication for providing access to health assessments, diagnoses, interventions, supervision, consultations, education, and information across a distance.
One prior art telehealth system includes biofeedback applications provided by Floan, James, Earles and Andrasik, and the U.S. Military which uses two telephone lines combined with other technology to conduct biofeedback sessions over great distances. The military application uses two way audio and video (teleconferencing) to communicate along with PC Anywhere type programs for PC to PC communication; but does not allow for the real-time transfer and observation of the physiological signals.
Disease management companies, so far are not providing real-time transmission of physiological data. The information that they do collect like EKG, and blood pressure are recorded and sent to the doctor hours later.
There is a great need for telemedicine technologies in homecare and ambulatory settings as outpatient disease management handles roughly one hundred million chronic patients in the US alone, which costs millions of dollars each year in ER, hospital, specialty and primary care.
It would therefore be desirable to provide an internet based software system capable of streaming, in real-time, EMG, ECG, EEG, peripheral temp, respiration, skin conductance/resistance, heart-rate variability, FFT, and DFT that would be capable of supporting most hardware.
It would also be desirable to provide such a system in which the hardware is plug-and-play compatible and thus will not require anyone to install any extra software.
What is also needed is software that can transmit signals in real-time, while simultaneously storing the data so that as the session is being recorded a user could back-up to see past events.